Israel and North American Jewish Youth

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

There has been no shortage of articles and books in recent years lamenting the apparent lessening of interest in and emotional ties to Israel on the part of North American Jewish youth. Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism documents this in great detail. There are many programs, such as Birthright Israel, which sends teenagers from Canada and the United States to visit Israel, that have struggled against this trend, with only limited success.

Very often, the blame is placed on specific Israeli policies, in particular relations with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. North American Jewish kids are mainly liberal, the argument goes, and they find much of what Israel does distasteful; as a result they feel defensive and uncomfortable when defending the Jewish state against its many detractors.

But perhaps the problem is even deeper than this. Perhaps today’s English-speaking North American young Jewish kids don’t see in Israelis “themselves,” the way older Jews did when they were young.

For the first 70 years or so of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine, following the creation of the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century, the community in Palestine, and then in the new state of Israel, was largely the child of secular east European Jewry. And so were the Jews who came to North America. The two were, so to speak, twins, and indeed, in many cases, individuals in the two communities were actual relatives. In almost all cases, they also spoke a common language, Yiddish.

This has changed dramatically. In recent decades very few North American secular Jews have moved to Israel. Today, the image of an Israeli might be a very religious “messianic” Zionist settler in the West Bank; a Jew from the Arab or Iranian Middle East; an Ethiopian or central Asian Jew; and a Jew from the Slavic republics of the former Soviet Union. Finally, there are the ultra-Orthodox. And most Israelis speak Hebrew (with some English), whereas North American Jews speak English – almost none can converse in Hebrew.

Therefore most Israelis today do not feel or sound or, in many cases, even look, like North American Jews. And even if some are relatives of people on this side of the world, they have typically never met them.

The West Bank settlers view the state in an eschatological context, seeing the entire land of Israel as having been given to the Jewish people by Divine decree, with not a square centimetre to be transferred to non-Jewish Arabs. Most North American Jews, especially younger ones, cannot subscribe to this view.

Other Jews in Israel, even if not religious, are also more likely to hold attitudes towards Arabs (including those who are Israeli citizens) that are at variance with the views of children on this continent, who are brought up in multicultural societies, where nationalism is often considered to be, ipso facto, racist and xenophobic. The Russian Jews, too, tend to be “hawks” when it comes to foreign policy.

So this chasm is clearly widening, despite the efforts of Jewish communal organizations to instill a sense of unity between Israel and the Diaspora, as it is a product of the current zeitgeist.

As this generation of North American Jews become adults, an embattled Israel may in future years find less emotional and uncritical support from among overseas Jewish communities than it did in, say, 1967 and 1973, when Israel was involved in major wars. This is for Israel a worrisome prospect.